Last week, CableLabs played host to 14 vendors during an addressable advertising interface interoperability event at its Louisville, Colo., headquarters.
The event included multi-vendor interoperability testing for dynamic video-on-demand ad insertion and other addressable advertising technologies. Second in a series, the event was part of the ongoing technical support CableLabs is providing to enable new forms of advertising on cable networks.
Participating companies demonstrated interoperability among their products based on Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) 130 standards for advanced digital advertising and CableLabs’ Stewardship and Fulfillment Interface (SaFI) standards for advanced advertising . The interop demonstrated the ability to dynamically insert ads into VOD avails based on addressability.
“We greatly appreciate continued vendor support of MSO interest in an end-to-end architecture that can support a variety of advanced advertising products,” said Don Dulchinos, senior vice president of advanced platforms at CableLabs.
The participating companies were Arris, Biap, BlackArrow, Cisco, Concurrent, Ensequence, Motorola, OpenTV, RGB Networks, Sigma Systems, Tandberg Television, This Technology, TVN Entertainment and UniSoft Corp.
“The collaborative effort by companies in this interop, as well as others in SCTE Digital Video Working Group 5, is helping to greatly refine and validate common standards for advanced advertising,” said Paul Woidke, senior vice president and general manager of advanced advertising for OpenTV and chairman of DVS/Working Group 5, the SCTE committee that is working on addressable advertising.
The vendors’ products included ad campaign managers, ad decision servers and information systems that segment subscribers, organize content and define advertising placement opportunities.
CableLabs said the vendors were able to demonstrate critical components in an end-to-end process, showing how an advertisement can be selected, dynamically inserted into an on-demand programming stream and delivered to a digital television customer.
The week finished up with vendor demonstrations, which were observed by business and technical executives from several cable operators and programming providers, along with experts from Canoe Ventures. Both SCTE 130 and CableLabs’ SaFI interfaces are elements of the Advanced Advertising 1.0 specification recently announced as a joint effort of Canoe Ventures and CableLabs (story here).
“We are very pleased with the strong, ongoing show of support from the vendor community for the Advanced Advertising 1.0 specification,” said Arthur Orduna, CTO of Canoe Ventures. “The increasing number of compliant products and the significant progress being made by leading technology providers are critical elements to making the advanced advertising market real for all players.”
Last week’s interoperability event was the second in a series of advanced advertising activities that CableLabs has supported and hosted last year and this year.
